QUICK DEMIHERO POST

 In PERSONA-TO-PERSONA CALLINGS, I wrote:

In some of my earliest writings on crossovers, I distinguished between "static crossovers" and "dynamic crossovers." I won't repeat those particular observations, but the salient aspect of that theory was that the static crossovers were those that were fairly regularized, like Donald Duck appearing in Uncle Scrooge's feature, while dynamic crossovers were those that spotlighted a more unusual meeting, say, of Spider-Man and Daredevil. I would now tend to state that, in contrast to the crossovers of the other three persona-types-- of heroes, villains, or monsters-- demiheroes only sustain crossovers of a dynamic kind, because most of them function as support-characters. Returning to the Batman cosmos, a story in which Alfred simply met police detective Harvey Bullock would not be a dynamic crossover. 

 

I'll make this observation short and sweet: though it's possible for the continuing demihero star of a series to sustain a crossover-vibe with an innominate character-- that is, a character drawn from myth, legend or imagined history-- one-shot demiheroes cannot sustain such a vibe.

Some examples of non-crossovers include:

A couple of nugatory Abbott and Costello characters meeting Mister Hyde is not a crossover. 

However, a movie in which a nugatory viewpoint character meets SEVERAL monster-icons-- who are all supposed to be strong template deviations of the original icons-- IS a crossover. 

The 1959 ALIAS JESSE JAMES causes a nugatory Bob Hope character to cross paths with the innominate icon Jesse James. The film is not a crossover for that reason.

But the same movie is a Low-Charisma Crossover thanks to one scene in which several western-heroes, played by actors associated with those characters, make cameos. These cameos included both innominate characters based on historical figures, such as Fess Parker's Davy Crockett, and nominative characters totally original to fiction, such as Ward Bond's Major Adams from WAGON TRAIN.

A bunch of nugatory characters essayed by The Three Stooges do not carry the vibe of a crossover when they meet Hercules.

HOWEVER--

If you have demiheroes who exist in a loose serial continuity, then you do get such crossovers, as when we have the cartoon demiheroes Tom Cat and Jerry Mouse encounter such innominate characters as Robin Hood--

Or a nominative character like Sherlock Holmes.

I hope that clears that up.😝

PROTO CROSSOVERS AND SUCH PT. 2

 As a result of my refinements in Part 1 of this series, I'm overturning some of the conclusions I made in COSMIC ALIGNMENT PART 2:

Marvel's Inhumans debuted in a 1965 issue of FANTASTIC FOUR, and the Black Panther appeared in the comic in the following year. It practically goes without saying that Lee and Kirby intended for both the Panther and the Inhumans to appear in serials at some point, but neither did for some time, and so for all of those appearances they register as Subs. In a special FF issue dated November 1967, both the Inhumans and the Black Panther crossed over with the Fantastic Four in fighting Psycho-Man. The Black Panther would not get a regular berth for another year, when he became a regular member of the Avengers in 1968, so within the compass of that story, he remained a Sub type. However, the special placed a more immediate push to see if readers wanted an Inhumans series, since in an issue of THOR, also dated November 1967, the denizens of Attilan received their first feature, albeit only a backup strip. So the FF ANNUAL would be a High-Stature crossover because the Inhumans had just become Primes around the time when the issue came out, while the equally enjoyable Panther had to wait another year for Prime status. 

This section is not incorrect with respect to the Black Panther and the Inhumans being Subs within the cosmos of the Prime stars, the Fantastic Four. However, the overall intent of the essay was to state that the debut stories of the new heroes did not count as crossovers because it took considerable time for any of them to get their own features. However, now I would consider that the debuts of both characters would count as "proto-crossovers," and so would any other stories produced before the "future Prime stars" got their own berths. 

Such a "proto-crossover" appears in a Captain America continuity from late 1967 through early 1968 (though all of the issues were dated1968). But Marvel did not wait to see whether or not the issues teaming up Cap with the Black Panther sold well, for the storyline culminated with the star-spangled crusader recommending the Panther for admission to The Avengers. The admission took place about a month or two later in AVENGERS #52, and this comprised the African prince's first role as a Prime in any series.

Now, all these "retroactive proto-crossovers" raise a question: if the debut of Black Panther in FANTASTIC FOUR is a proto-crossover, is the same true of an ADAPTATION of that story, such as the one that appears in an episode of the 1994-96 FANTASTIC FOUR animated series. But my answer to this question is NO. For one thing, within the corpus of existing episodes in this series, the Black Panther never had the chance to ascend to Prime status, so he's just a Sub within the series, in contrast to the comic book universe from which he comes.

Now, had the MCU adapted the FF continuity for a full-fledged FANTASTIC FOUR movie, and then spun BLACK PANTHER off into his own series, THAT would have made the hypothetical FF film a proto-crossover. CAPTAIN AMERICA CIVIL WAR was the MCU movie that launched the company's version of the Panther, but it's not a straight adaptation, but a new story, and is therefore governed by a different set of rules. The MCU always had the intent to spin the Panther off into his own film, and since CIVIL WAR sets up the storyline for the 2018 BLACK PANTHER, I don't deem CIVIL WAR to be a proto-crossover, just a Full Crossover in which the MCU Panther is a strong template deviation of the one in the comic books.

However, when one is dealing with "strong template deviations" rather than the weak type seen in a direct adaptation, it isn't strictly necessary for a character to get his own feature. Nick Fury is a Prime star within Marvel comic books, though his career in the comics has probably put him most often into the role of a Sub support-character rather than that of a Prime. To date the MCU has produced a strong template deviation of Fury, and there are no indications that he's EVER going to be anything to the MCU but a Prime demoted to the level of a Sub. Yet thanks to his comic-book career Nick Fury has enough stature that even his first appearance in the 2008 IRON MAN qualifies as a Full Crossover. 

PROTO CROSSOVERS AND SUCH

 As long as I've just devoted this post to picking apart one of my side observations in ONCE AND FUTURE STATURE (AND CHARISMA), I might as well rework almost the whole thing.

This part is still okay:

--a CROSSOVER depends on the association of two or more characters (or other focal entities) from established properties. The prospective reader may be familiar with all of the crossover figures, only one, or none at all, but the appeal is to pull in the reader who wants to see the association of established characters.

This part is fairly accurate except that it needs a term-change:

 --a SPINOFF depends on the association of one or more completely new characters (or focal entities) who "tailgate" on the back of one or more established characters/entities. The usual intent is to create a new franchise, usually one in serial form, that then stands for the most part independent of the established franchise. At best, then, a SPINOFF is a DEMI-CROSSOVER, using "demi" less in the exactly proportional sense of "half" than with the equally valid connotation of "lesser."

I've decided that "demi-crossover" does not capture the sense of what I'm talking about as the new term ***"proto-crossover." *** And on top of that, I've decided that I want to toss in a term for the "failed spinoff," which I will call the ***null-crossover,"*** because the intent was to use an established icon to promote the cosmos of a new icon, but said universe never comes into being, and from the POV of the audience, the icons who would have been the center of that universe just become Subs in the universe of the established Prime icon.

Now, occasionally there are some mashups that resemble proto-crossovers in the way the figures align. According to my current thought, the first Green Goblin appearance is a "proto-crossover," but only because the new villains teams up with a group of established villain-icons, the Enforcers. I also discussed in ONCE AND FUTURE a later Goblin in which the villain had an encounter  with a new villain, the Crime Master. I called this a "demi-crossover" at the time, but now I would not call it either that or "proto-crossover," because the Crime Master is slain at the conclusion of that two-part story. Since the story's authors do not intend for this villain to generate a cosmos of his own, within the sphere of Spider-Man's adventures or anywhere else, it is homologous with an "null-crossover," where the Sub icon will never be anything else.

And that's enough crossover-chopping for today.

PERSONA-TO-PERSONA CALLINGS

 In ONCE AND FUTURE STATURE (AND CHARISMA), published on 7-27-22 I made the following inexact statement: 

Lee had Foswell return to crime as an ally to the newly minted Kingpin-- only to be killed by the Kingpin's thugs for trying to protect Jameson. This might be deemed a demi-crossover of the charismatic kind, since Foswell had some escalation-charisma even as a support-figure, and the Kingpin had none until he appeared often enough to become a familiar figure.

I added a note to the blogpost to the effect that I would trash this opinion in another essay, and this is it.

The problem with my previous formulation is related to my ongoing theory of personas, given its final form in 2012's DIAL D FOR DEMIHERO PART 1. I feel as if I've implied, though never stated outright, this necessary rule:

"When dealing with icons who originate within the cosmos of a given series, there can be no charisma-crossovers except between icons belonging to the same persona."

An example: within the Batman series, Commissioner Gordon and the Joker have existed almost the same number of years, and have frequently appeared in the same stories. Both characters are Subordinate Icons to Batman, but there's no charisma-crossover between the two Subs as there is when the Joker appears in a story alongside another villain, such as the Penguin or Two-Face.

 

To return to the Spider-Man cosmos once more, Fred Foswell may have started out as a super-villain, but he spends the majority of his career as a demihero in the Lee-Ditko stories, wherein he's reformed and become a crusading reporter, generally being of aid to Spider-Man or the police but only with the limited actions of a demihero. Lee and Romita change him back to a villain who conspires with the Kingpin, probably because neither creator cared anything about Foswell and simply wanted to be rid of him. Nevertheless, Foswell's gratitude toward J. Jonah Jameson causes him to betray the Kingpin to save Jameson, which means that his brief conversion back to villainy was less than consequential in summing up his character arc. So Foswell dies, according to my system, a demihero.

So by my newly stated rule, Foswell might in theory interact with another demihero in the SPIDER-MAN cosmos, and that might be a charisma-crossover. Nevertheless, such a crossover would have to have something unusual about it, rather than just Fred Foswell bumping into Betty Brant or Jonah Jameson in the news room. For that matter, Foswell bumping into any of Peter Parker's college-chums-- which I don't believe ever happened-- would also prove inadequate to sustain any charisma. Now, if Stan Lee had written a bizarre story in which Fred Foswell was revealed to be the real father of Flash Thompson, then THAT might be a charisma-crossover, but even then it would be largely because the two characters had spent a long time in the Spider-cosmos acting independently of one another. 

In some of my earliest writings on crossovers, I distinguished between "static crossovers" and "dynamic crossovers." I won't repeat those particular observations, but the salient aspect of that theory was that the static crossovers were those that were fairly regularized, like Donald Duck appearing in Uncle Scrooge's feature, while dynamic crossovers were those that spotlighted a more unusual meeting, say, of Spider-Man and Daredevil. I would now tend to state that, in contrast to the crossovers of the other three persona-types-- of heroes, villains, or monsters-- demiheroes only sustain crossovers of a dynamic kind, because most of them function as support-characters. Returning to the Batman cosmos, a story in which Alfred simply met police detective Harvey Bullock would not be a dynamic crossover. But if the two of them joined forces to accomplish some mission, as the characters did in an episode of "Gotham," I would consider that a charisma-crossover. This principle builds on what I said here about viewing the meeting of two URUSEI YATSURA support-types as a charisma-crossover, because they immediately challenge one another.

Now crossovers of demiheroes from different universes are a different matter, since those are dynamic by definition. On my blog OUROBOROS DREAMS I devoted a post to a multi-demihero crossover, a TV-cartoon entitled POPEYE MEETS THE MAN WHO HATED LAUGHTER. Although the humorous hero Popeye is the star of the show, he's conned into bringing together a few dozen characters from funny comic strips, all under the aegis of King Features Syndicate, and including both famous types like Blondie and Dagwood and near-forgotten types like Snuffy Smith. Some "serious" heroes are mixed in as well, but almost all of the crossover-characters are of the demiheroic persona.

Similarly, there's no problem crossing over demiheroes with other persona who originate in separate conceptual universes. When DC Comics finally brought back their late sixties character Brother Power, who belongs to the "monster" persona, they did so in 1989's SWAMP THING ANNUAL #5. But the Brother didn't cross paths with the monster-protagonist of the feature, but with two of Swamp Thing's support-characters, Abby Arcane and Chester Williams. A crossover with Swamp Thing would have been a stature-crossover, but Brother Power meeting Swamp Thing's friends only works on the level of cosmic charisma.

 

MYTHCOMICS: "THE DEATH OF THE DOOM PATROL" (DOOM PATROL #98, 1965)

I've occasionally noted my liking for the Silver Age DOOM PATROL  for an assortment of reasons. One was that it was one of the first DC features to successfully ape the "soap-opera adventure" mode popularized by Marvel Comics. Another was that writer Arnold Drake was the only talent who even came close to Stan Lee in the department of making witty quips. That said, Lee also benefited from the fabulous design-abilities of his collaborator Jack Kirby. Drake's DOOM PATROL collaborator, the Italian Bruno Premiani, produced visuals with a wonky charm (partly because of his dicey use of forced perspective), but he probably didn't bring any new ideas to the table.

The feature had been running about two years by the time of "The Death of the Doom Patrol." Like a lot of shock-based concepts seen at Silver Age DC, it depends on a sudden upheaval in the status quo, when the Patrol's wheelchair-bound mentor, The Chief, tells his freaky superhero subordinates that he's terminating their employment. 

Nothing daunted, the heroes proceed to build their own HQ (with what resources, Drake does not specify). Then, rather than waiting the entire length of the tale for the big reveal like many DC stories, Drake provides two panels in which The Chief confirms his self-diagnosis of imminent death. He's only kicked out his proteges in order to force them to make their own way in the superhero game, which is a adult-to-child psychological trope that's appealing, however problematic.

Meanwhile, the newly independent Patrol is confronted by their first new super-villain, Mister 103, named for the number of elements on the periodic table in 1965. The dorky-looking fellow successfully robs a bank vault by turning into such diverse elements as lead, neon, magnesium, sulfur and magnetic iron, all in a mere two pages. The team's first encounter with the villain is a total failure, and they immediately "run to daddy" for advice. They learn learn the reasons for the Chief's rejection and the nature of his malady, a fatal infusion of radioactive copper. However, it just happens that the very thing the super-scientist was investigating during his accident is the thing that can defeat the Atom Master.

Armed with a new weapon, Robotman and Negative Man (who get all the action, Elasti-Girl being consigned to weeping over her dying mentor) confront 103 and paralyze him with an alien freeze-ray. Negative Man saves the day by figuring that if 103's element-transformation ray can give the villain the power to change himself, it can also change an individual human into one element-- that of pure copper-- and then totally reverse that transformation. I confess that even for a comic book, this problematic science doesn't even make as much sense as the Tootsie Pop ad at the bottom of page 16, and the quick reversal of the Patrol's "death" is not all that mythic in and of itself.

What "Death" does well, though, is to play upon the cosmological fascination of the elements of nature, through the lens of a superhero adventure. I've addressed the idea of "element-villains" a couple of times on this blog, noting that the earliest example known to me, the Justice Society tale "Vampires of the Void," failed to develop the epistemological patterns implicit in the theme. Then with the advent of the Silver Age, a number of DC writers seemed to become fascinated with the periodic table as a source of villain-powers. The first mythic villain of this kind was 1958's Mister Element, quickly followed by a less well developed fellow, Bill Finger's Elemental Man in DETECTIVE COMICS #294 (1961). A year later, metals, rather than elements, were turned into crusading crimefighters in the form of Robert Kanigher's METAL MEN (1962), and 1965 also brought to DC a new "Element Man" in the form of Bob Haney's Metamorpho. But one of the more interesting aspects of the Drake story is that the Chief's illness via "radioactive copper" plays upon the body's real need of copper in the formulation of hemoglobin, and upon the fact that too much copper can poison a human body-- giving this comic-book illness a bit more vraisemblance than was usual.

COORDINATING INTERORDINATION PT. 2

In Part 1, I emphasized that when I spoke of my newly christened category of "interordination," I conceived it to be a subset of all those narrative strategies that Julie Kristaeva designated as "intertextuality," stating at the essay's conclusion: 

I don't expect to use interordination on a regular basis, except as a means to clarify the ways in which crossovers belong more properly to this specific type of "quotation" rather than to the more generalized category of intertextuality.

Upon exploring even the basic Wiki writeup of intertextuality, I find that other critics have attempted to make distinctions between different forms of the concept:

Intertextuality has been differentiated into referential and typological categories. Referential intertextuality refers to the use of fragments in texts and the typological intertextuality refers to the use of pattern and structure in typical texts

The term "typological" has some appeal to me because in INTERORDINATION PT. 1, I devoted particular attention to the example of the Moore-Gibbons WATCHMEN as comprising several forms of intertextuality, none of which relate to the subcategory of interordination as I've conceived it. But even "typological" needs some finessing. What is Alan Moore doing when he bases his WATCHMEN-heroes upon the Charlton heroes? He is *emulating* certain *tropes* that he observed in the earlier stories of the heroes, after which he then crossbreeds those tropes with other tropes. Of course, all of these were borrowed from other sources as well.

In fact, all literature as we have it now is founded in "trope emulation." From caveman times on, one author puts forth an icon of some sort (not necessarily an original one) that his auditors find pleasing, so the next author tries to emulate something about the icon in order to enjoy similar popularity. In Classical times, one can observe this process in Athens' belated attempts to formulate a city-hero, their Theseus, in loose emulation of Thebes' protector Herakles.

Now, going back to Wiki: what does the essay's author mean by "referential intertextuality?" Without going into this too much, the basic contrast is that this form directly borrows from passages in earlier works. Though this concept is not a direct parallel to my line of thought, it's close enough to suggest a contrast to "trope emulation," and that is "icon emulation." In the latter formulation, a derivative author does not choose to create a new character, but attempts to tell a new story with an old character. To be sure, "newness" is difficult to ascertain with archaic figures, given that it's impossible to be 100% sure when a given Herakles story originated. At best, archaeology can tell us the earliest known record of a given story. However, we can be relatively sure that even the earliest Herakles stories were not all devised by one writer, but by innumerable authors-- some of whose stories may have simply fallen off the cultural map. 

Returning to the importance of names outlined in I THINK ICON, I THINK ICON, Moore took all of the tropes he borrowed from Steve Ditko's hero The Question, plus all those he took from other sources, and thus forged a new character, Rorschach. No matter how many fan-readers know about the influence of The Question, the name of Rorschach keeps him distinct from the Ditko character, far more than any of the formal differences between the characters.

Such formal differences are of lesser importance because in many cases an author utilizing "icon emulation" may deviate from the original model just as much as does the one utilizing "trope emulation." 

Steve Ditko's character of The Question appeared in about half a dozen stories for Charlton Comics, and since these were produced under an implicit work-for-hire contract, the stories and the character both belonged to Charlton. When DC bought up all or most of the Charlton superheroes, DC then produced several new "icon emulation" variations on those characters-- and of these variants, none diverged quite as far from the original model as the 1987 Question first produced by writer Denny O"Neil and artist Denys Cowan. Ditko supplied nearly no character traits or back history for "Vic Sage," the secret identity of his crusader, and only a very marginal rationale for the hero's blank-masked appearance, since Ditko was principally concerned with using the hero as a spokesman for philosophical belief. O'Neil not only paid zero attention to any of the philosophies exposed by the Ditko character, he formulated a detailed back history for Sage-- even to the extent of stating that his name was a revision of an Eastern European cognomen-- and gave the New Question all sorts of "film noir" adventures in which the nature of good and evil was never as distinct as it was in Ditko.

Yet, by keeping the name of the character and a few choice bits of his mythology, O'Neil's Question is an icon derived from an icon, rather than being an icon created from some of the tropes that constituted the original icon.

It's because of this "crypto-continuity," as I dubbed it earlier, that it's possible to view derivative icons as being coterminous with their original models. Thus, despite all the dissimilarities between the Kong of the 1933 film and the Kong who fights Godzilla, the two Kongs are coterminous because the second icon was grounded in the identity of the first one. The same applies to all of the various icons based on non-fictional originals like Billy the Kid and Jack the Ripper. I've pointed out that such characters are based on what I term "innominate texts," meaning that the models are not purely fictional, but there's still a icon-to-icon derivation, rather than a trope-to-icon derivation.

In closing, I devoted some space in I THINK ICON to the fact that "icons" included countless entities that are not characters as such, but only cited a couple of examples. Another noteworthy example is Edgar Rice Burroughs' land of Pellucidar, an environment characterized by its assorted flora and fauna as well as its unique location at the center of the Earth. In the formal "Earth's Core" series, the entire environment of Pellucidar is simply a subordinate icon to whatever hero is the star of the story. However, in 1929 Burroughs produced his most distinctive crossover of two franchises, by having Tarzan, superordinate icon of his own series, have adventures within the environment of Pellucidar. Because Pellucidar is not normally aligned to Tarzan's adventures, this interaction rates as a "charisma-crossover."

ADDENDUM: Since I've previously made some remarks on spoof-versions of established figures, the sort I'm now calling "icons," I feel I should expand on these remarks. Spoofs are for the most part "trope emulations" because the artists simply borrow tropes from the originals, frequently (though not always) distancing the spoof-characters from the originals with goofy names like "Batboy and Rubin." But it's possible for an author to produce an "icon emulation" that is loosely coterminous with the original, even if said author decides to alter the myth-radical that dominates the established icon. Such icons as Superman, Modesty Blaise, and The Lone Ranger all belong to the mythos of adventure. However, the filmed stage play of SUPERMAN-- THE MUSICAL is a full icon emulation of Superman, but in the mode of comedy, while both Modesty Blaise and The Lone Ranger got redone into modes of irony for the big screen.

I THINK ICON, I THINK ICON

Icon: in semiotics, a sign characterized by iconicity, the resemblance to what it signifies

Since the early days of this blog I've flirted with many terms for the various presences inhabiting fictional world-scapes. I've called them  focal and non-focal, centric and eccentric, coes and subs, and finally, superordinate and subordinate presences. But I've stuck with the term "presences" since I first started writing about such things, because the term was the best one I could find for all the various fictional figures that can influence the outcome of a narrative: not just human beings but also flora, fauna, environments, imaginary beings both sentient and non-sentient, artifacts created by humans or by similar entities, or even discarnate forces like "The Crazy Ray" of Rene Clair's 1924 film.

But now, before I write the next section of COORDINATING INTERORDINATION, I have to specify a better term than "presences," because "presences" is not good enough to imply the matrix of motives that will cause one authorial will to emulate the products of another authorial will. What I formerly called "presences" I will now call "icons."

Though my above quote from Wikipedia uses the term "icon" as it appears in modern semiotics, I'm not invoking that discipline in any way. I would imagine that when some semiotician decided to import the term into his system, he was roughly thinking about how religious icons were supposed to represent either religious figures or aspects of religious belief, as opposed, say, to figures whose resemblance to what they represented was more abstract.

For the purpose of my discussion of interordination, an icon is any kind of strongly definable entity in a given narrative. Icons are either superordinate, meaning that the action of the narrative centers upon the nature of the subordinate icon, or subordinate, meaning that these icons exist to support and explicate the mythology of the superordinate icon. The superordinate icon is the icon-type which later authors most often seek to copy from earlier authors, whether those earlier authors established an earlier icon as part of a legal franchise or as a figure in informal folklore. When a later author emulates the subordinate icon produced by an earlier author, it's usually because said icon generated some level of special popularity -- the Joker, the Wicked Witch of the West. 

Now, popularity is not strictly necessary. It's possible for even the most minor figures to be adapted for whatever purpose the derivative author wishes to accomplish. For instance, in all likelihood no play-goer watching HAMLET ever gave much thought to the extremely minor characters of Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern. However, in 1966 Tom Stoppard made these toss-off icons into the stars of his absurdist play ROSENKRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD, and within that play, these formerly nugatory characters become the stars of the show.

The base rule for an icon to be "strongly definable" is that he, she, or it must have either a name given somewhere in the text, or it must be possible for some critic to construct a distinctive name for an unnamed entity from the events of the narrative. In an operative sense, it's almost impossible for a derivative author to do anything with icons that are merely bare stereotypes, like "that cop who shot at Spider-Man in that one Romita story" or "the 553rd lion killed by Tarzan." 

In a practical sense, even an unnamed icon must have some special identity on which a critic can hang some distinction. In INCREDIBLE HULK #1 (1962), Lee and Kirby devoted one panel to an anonymous soldier who gives a name to the big green monster who shows up on the soldier's base. Many years later, because the nameless soldier had that distinction, writer Peter David constructed a short, stand-alone story about "the man who named the Hulk" for one of the HULK annuals-- which one, I'm not sure at the moment. In my 2014 essay OBJECTS GIVEN LUSTER, I defined the focal presence of the EC story "The Destruction of the Earth" (WEIRD SCIENCE #14) as the Earth itself, since the story spends most of its time showing how the planet will be annihilated, while in contrast all of the human characters in the story remain bare stereotypes. So if I were making a designation of the story's focal icon, I would concoct a distinctive name for that version of the planet, such as "The Destroyed Earth."

In my next essay it will become evident as to why a more felicitous term was necessary, when I start expounding on the concept of emulation.

MYTHCOMICS: CAPTAIN KEN (WEEKLY SHONEN SUNDAY, 1960-61)

I hope to slowly work my way through the early works of Osamu Tezuka in quest of mythcomics, since the only ones I've mentioned thus far have stemmed from the latter part of his career. So far I've found nothing in the corpus of his most famous creation, ASTRO BOY, which his PRINCESS KNIGHT works didn't quite make my cut. But CAPTAIN KEN, a "space western" from 1960, proves a happy exception. This essay makes heavy use of--

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

I don't have any knowledge of Tezuka's no-doubt-complex feelings toward American culture, given that it was the source of many of the early comics that influenced him, yet also spawned the atomic bomb with which American forces humbled the martial might of Japan. I doubt that he set down any thoughts about one of the most archetypal genres of America, the western, but in CAPTAIN KEN the artist managed to produce a commentary on the genre that may offer a reconciliation of both good and bad sentiments.

According to a prologue, uttered by a member of the Martian race (the "Indians" of the story), the first Earthlings to colonize Mars in 1983 were Americans, and so these are the people who institute the wholesale slaughter and enslavement of the natives for several generations to come. However, the prologue also mentions a single Earthling who saves the Martian race. American westerns had their share of "savior-figures" who sought to save Native Americans from a dire fate, however temporarily, and in modern politics these are deemed as bad juju for not allowing the Indians to save themselves, or something like that. Long before this political trope evolved, Tezuka dodged this particular bullet by making his savior-hero a member of a marginalized community on Mars: Japanese colonists, who have become part and parcel of American's Westernization of the Martian environment.

Mamoru, who fills the part of a viewpoint character for the work's early chapters, has lived on Mars all his life, though Tezuka is careful to point out that some if not all Japanese emigrants still esteem the culture of their society on Earth. Mamoru is attacked by hostile Martian tribes known as "the Moro," but he's saved by a strange young man known as Captain Ken, accompanied by Arrow, his resourceful robot horse. Mamoru assumes that the so-called captain is a distant relative who's expected to visit Mamoru's family, but the young man disappears. When Mamoru gets home, he finds that the actual traveler, a young woman named Kenn Minakami, has appeared at his family's house. Since she looks to be the spitting image of Captain Ken, but says she has no siblings or similar relatives, Mamoru wonders if Ken and Kenn are one and the same.

Tezuka keeps this suspicion going for several chapters, probably encouraging readers to believe that he Tezuka was mining the same tropes he'd used with PRINCESS KNIGHT, wherein a young woman masqueraded as a male for fight for justice. I'll spoil the big reveal right now: Captain Ken is the time-traveling son of the adult woman that Kenn will later become, which explains the resemblance. Ken's mission will also be revealed late in the series, and once the reader knows it, it may seem somewhat counter-intuitional for the hero to run around fighting assorted menaces that don't have anything to do with his main mission.

Still, on some level Tezuka wanted his readers to invest in a traditional Western protagonist, who does not hesitate to stand up for what's right, even when most of the people in his culture have become corrupt. So Ken, with or without help from the locals, opposes the town's corrupt mayor, his rowdy son Double, the gunfighter Lamp and a mysterious supercriminal named Napoleon. He also champions the insect-like Moro against the ruthless exploiters from Earth, and bonds with a female Moro named Papillon (French for "butterfly"). Despite the fact that they are of different species, Tezuka strongly implies that Papillon cherishes erotic feelings for Ken, though the hero does not notice her lovelorn nature and remains focused on his general mission.

After several peripatetic adventures, some of which find ingenious ways for the hero to interact with the Martian environment, the Moro launch a major offensive against the Earthlings. This pushes the Earthling president-- who is actually the criminal Napoleon-- to launch a solar bomb designed to wipe out the Martians, with all the settlers as collateral damage. Around the same time, Ken reveals to Mamoru his true origins: that he comes from another time-line in which the solar bomb went off and caused his mother, Kenn Minakami, to suffer awful delayed-reaction symptoms. Utilizing a convenient time machine, Ken and his robot horse travel back to the earlier phase of Martian history to undo the injury to Ken's mother. This mission also dovetails with saving the Martian race from extinction, but given Ken's democratic treatment of the natives, the two goals seem coterminous in terms of justice rather than mutually exclusive. Ken, accompanied by Papillon in what might be read as a "love-death," sacrifices his life to avert the solar bomb. His mother Kenn never knows what her son is destined to do, but Mamoru does, and by story's end it's clear that Mamoru is destined to marry Kennn and become the father of the doomed hero.

Like many time-travel paradoxes, one is not meant to poke at the dominos too much. If in the new reality Kenn never suffers the solar bomb's effects, then does Ken have any motive to go back in time and change reality? Does he go back at all, and if he doesn't, does the original reality re-assert itself? The time-travel part of the story is CAPTAIN KEN's least interesting aspect. A note from Tezuka in the manga's second observes that the artist's readers didn't quite know what to make of this space-western, with the result that CAPTAIN wasn't as popular as other contemporaneous works. Perhaps those Japanese readers weren't quite ready to grapple with the trope of the Western hero, an idealized hero who was meant to redeem the misdeeds of his own culture in the name of higher justice.

The 2014 English-language reprints of the manga also include a disclaimer about Tezuka's representations of race. Maybe this was a boilerplate they prepared for other works in which Tezuka made use of caricatures now considered politically incorrect, but there are no such images in CAPTAIN KEN, unless one is triggered by the idea of the insect-Martians being compared to real Native Americans.

COORDINATING INTERORDINATION

Now that I've set down some thoughts as to the emotional appeal of crossovers in THE DIFFICULTY OF WHAT'S FASCINATING, I want to veer back to justifying that appeal in terms of what it means in  a philosophical sense to associate characters who stem from different textual "universes."

I played around with the notion that what it means to associate such universes, and I meditated on the literary concept of "intertextuality," as it was coined by Julie Kristeva in 1966 and as it's been used in numerous literary essays since, including not a few on the comics medium. Here's one of many examples of how the term has been used.

However, while the crossover-phenomenon probably should be seen as a subset of the entirety of things that can be intertextual, the term itself is too general to describe the specific phenomenon.

For instance, without even looking I'm sure that one can find numerous comments about the Alan Moore-Dave Gibbons WATCHMEN being "intertextual." And such assertions would be accurate. WATCHMEN quotes instances from real-world history, from poorly understood philosophical concepts (seen in Moore's mangling of Friedrich Nietzsche), and of course, from previous comic book characters. The ensemble of heroes in WATCHMEN were famously modeled upon characters originally published by Charlton Comics, whose "universe" DC Comics had just purchased. Moore considered basing his team of heroes upon the Charlton crusaders, but instead ended up simply using the earlier characters as models for new characters.

Is this intertextual? Yes, but it has nothing to do with crossovers. Crossovers may rework established characters so drastically that their readers barely recognize them, as per my frequent example of BILLY THE KID VS. DRACULA. But there's always some assertion of identity between the old and the new-- and there's nothing of the kind in WATCHMEN.

What I needed was something in line with my definition of narrative in, well, THE BEST DEFINITION OF NARRATIVE:

All narrative is a movement consisting of the interaction of one or more Primes (superordinate presences) with one or more Subs (subordinate presences).

This meditation led me to a term that suits my needs better than intertextuality, and depends solely upon the concept of "ordination."

interordination noun

—(linguistics) A reciprocal relationship between two terms

Within my system, what this definition calls "two terms" can be expanded into "two or more presences within a narrative nexus," whether those presences are superordinate or subordinate. What I've called "stature-crossovers" concern the reciprocal relationship of two or more superordinate characters from different cosmologies. "Charisma-crossovers," in contrast, concern the reciprocal relationship of two or more subordinate characters, or between at least one superordinate character and one subordinate character from another cosmology. (Just to get away from using superhero-supervillain charisma-crossovers, I'll note that the same phenomenon appears when two supporting-characters within a cosmology forge a "reciprocal relationship," such as we see when the main stars of URUSEI YATSURA take a back seat to watching two members of their support-cast, Benten and Ryunosuke, butt heads.

I don't expect to use interordination on a regular basis, except as a means to clarify the ways in which crossovers belong more properly to this specific type of "quotation" rather than to the more generalized category of intertextuality.

THE DIFFICULTY OF WHAT'S FASCINATING

I subjected most of my essays on crossovers to a spot-reading and came to a conclusion: I don't think I've spent enough time on why people can and do become fascinated-- if not to the extent that I do-- with the way different characters and concepts intertwine.

Looking back on my OUROBOROS DREAMS essay THE LOGIC AND APPEAL OF CROSSOVERS,

 I provided this observation:

... the overlapping of distinct storylines would seem to intensify the degree of mental effort an audience-member must exert in order to participate in the crossover's intersecting universes.  For instance, when Rider Haggard takes a character who exists in a moderately realistic universe, i.e., Allan Quatermain, and causes him to encounter a character whose nature is overtly supernatural, Haggard must find some way to treat both characters with integrity, even though the ground rules of their universes are in conflict.

And then, slightly afterward:

 It's something of a given in literary criticism to state that audiences, literary or sub-literary, maintain interest in fictional characters by identifying with them.  This commonplace observation is not so much wrong as overly simple. As I am what has been called a "myth-critic," I assert that the process of identification comes about as a reader (or viewer) realizes what kind of role the character plays in the story, and what that fictional role means to the reader. This does not mean "identification" in the simple-minded sense of "I want to be like this person," for identification can take place with any number of villains (the Joker, Freddy Krueger), monsters (Godzilla) or even mysterious locales (the subterranean domain of Jules Verne's "Center of the Earth.")  It is more properly an appreciation of what I will call the "mana" appropriate to the character or concept's role in the story. 

This essay was written in April 2014, a good five years before I refined my analysis on the two primary types of reader-identification, in INVESTMENT VS. FASCINATION. These two categories described in more precise terms the dichotomous ways in which readers "identified" with fictional figures. The way of investment was one of sympathy toward one or more figures, loosely sharing their joys or sorrows. The way of fascination was one of seeking to understand the ways of one or more figures who were more antipathetic in nature. The latter type of figures, which would include all of the examples given in the second citation above, might be fairly called by the Sartrean term of "the other," though this phrase only holds value in a comparative sense. What I called "mana" in the 2014 essay I would probably now reference as "the totality of correlations and/or contemplations that make this or that character resonant," drawing somewhat on Frye's idea of myth as "a treasure-trove of literary tropes."

The appeal of crossovers would also seem to line up more with the process of fascination than with investment. With investment one takes the "short view," identifying with the struggles of Spider-Man or Stephen Daedalus or whoever. But as soon as one brings together characters who are part of a larger design-- even if it's just Batman fighting The Flash's enemy The Weather Wizard-- then one is taking something of the "long view" that allows the reader to understand what makes a Joker or a Godzilla tick, for all that one doesn't really especially sympathize with them. 

So much for the reader's response to crossovers. But how do professional writers use pre-established concepts to craft stories? The writers implicitly want the readers to be fascinated-- that's what puts food on the table-- but all writers don't approach crossover-materials the same way.

Every original character or concept provides a template for later creators to either follow closely or to depart from as needed. Readers of serial concepts often perceive how much or how little a given author can accurately reproduce the desired aspects of a particular favored feature. In some cases, even a creator of such a concept may change his creative stance for personal or exigent reasons. BATMAN co-creator Bill Finger collaborated on some of the early stories, with all their delirious Gothic imagery, but he probably ended up authoring far more of the gimmicky "Candyland Batman" stories. 

My loose categories of the template deviations have been thus far the "weak deviation," "the strong deviation," and "the total deviation."

 "Total deviation" applies to figures who may copy some visual or designative aspect of a character, but who actually have no substantial connection with the template. So far I've included in this category characters who impersonate famous figures (or are constructed for that purpose), parodies, and doppelgangers who strongly reference famous figures.

"The weak deviation" is the one where, in theory, the storyteller shares the devoted reader's fascination with the involved continuity of a character, or of the continuities of an ensemble of characters, and does his best to keep everything "on-model," to borrow the animation phrase.

"The strong deviation," however, is the one in which the narrative's creator feels a great deal of freedom to riff on the original template-- and that's where the fans of a given franchise usually come out with knives drawn. I've produced my share of jeremiads on this subject, such as my ruminations on the dramatic shortcomings of Kevin Feige. Nevertheless, I part company with those critics and podcasters who automatically dislike every alternative take on a given template. I admit that it's more common for an alternative take to be bad than to be good, but it does happen. One high-profile version is the Grant Morrison version of DOOM PATROL, which I examined somewhat in the 2011 essay CHIEF CONCERNS. 

From one standpoint, a crossover-production with a great deal of fidelity to established continuity, like the Busiek-Perez JUSTICE LEAGUE/AVENGERS, ought to sustain the readers' fascination with all those involved story-threads. Morrison's strategy with DOOM PATROL-- which had nominal crossover-aspects in certain issues-- was to maintain some minor continuity-aspects while seeking to fascinate readers with Morrison's erudite reading of culture and aesthetics. Morrison's take was successful enough that a number of later creators attempted to follow his lead rather than emulating the older incarnations (though I imagine John Byrne's tenure, which I did not read, was the exception).

Interestingly, on occasion Morrison shows some of the same "political correctness" for which I've faulted Kevin Feige. However, Morrison does have other interests beyond superficial politics. Thus even a scene like the one above-- in which two Silver Age super-villains confess "the love that dare not speak its name"-- has an appealing absurdity. So Morrison, unlike Feige, that makes me, for one, curious about the "new DOOM PATROL universe" Morrison creates, "strong deviation" though it may be, because it's not simply preaching at me.